Cursed By His Mercy

Chapter Nine: What Renata Carried Home

POV: King Kael Ashgrave

I sent Draven after Renata's retinue before the woman had even cleared the outer gate quietly, no guard uniform, nothing that would look like suspicion rather than routine escortand I regretted it within the hour, because Draven came back looking like a man who'd confirmed the worst thing he'd gone looking for.

"She stopped at the tree line," he said, dropping into the chair across my desk without ceremony, the way he does when the news is bad enough that formality feels like wasted effort. "Met a rider already waiting for her. Handed something off. A letter, I'd guess, though I wasn't close enough to be certain, and I didn't dare get closer without her noticing she was being watched."

"You think it was about Elara."

"I think it was about Elara before she'd even finished her second course. I watched her face the whole dinner, Kael. She wasn't cataloguing a lottery girl's manners. She was building a report." He rubbed both hands over his face, and for a moment the exhaustion in him was ten years deep, all of it mine, all of it earned on my behalf. "Veyloth's been circling for an opening since before Father died. A girl who walks into this castle unafraid, holds her own against a trained envoy, and has the King himself abandoning a decade of careful distance to sit her at his right hand that's not an opening. That's an invitation."

"So what would you have me do." My voice came out sharper than I meant it, though not at him, not really at the whole impossible architecture of the thing, the curse and the crown and the war camped patiently on our border for two centuries waiting for exactly this kind of c***k to widen. "Send her back to Thistlewood? Pretend the last seven days didn't happen?"

"I would have you be careful," Draven said, quiet now, all the earlier heat burned out of it. "That's all I've ever asked. I watched you build walls around every soft thing in your life because you decided, a decade ago, that the alternative was watching it get used against you. I'm not telling you to go back to being that man. I liked him considerably less than I like you now, if I'm honest, however much safer he was to be around." He stood, hand briefly heavy on my shoulder — the closest thing to tenderness either of us has ever been comfortable showing the other. "I'm telling you that whatever this is, with her — it isn't just yours to risk anymore. It's hers too. Veyloth doesn't care whose heart gets caught in the middle of a war they've been planning since before she was born."

He left me with that, and I sat alone in the dark of my study a long while, turning his warning over the way I turn over every warning I've been given in ten years of ruling a cursed line weighing exactly how much of it was fear talking, and how much was truth I didn't want to hear.

I found her, later, on the cliff path again, because I was starting to understand that was simply where she went when the castle grew too loud around her, and some part of me had started going there too, on the nights I needed the same.

"Draven followed Renata," I said, no preamble, because I'd decided somewhere on the walk out that she deserved the truth plainly, not softened. "She passed a message to a rider at the tree line. About you, almost certainly."

She didn't flinch, which I was coming to expect from her and still found myself unprepared for every time. "Then I've made things worse. For you, and for the whole castle, and I've been here a week."

"You've made things honest," I said. "Which isn't the same thing, whatever it feels like right now." I looked out at the water, black and restless under a moon three-quarters gone, and found the next part harder to say than I'd expected, though I'd known, walking out here, that I meant to say it. "I told you, at the table, that I was tired of hiding everyone who mattered before they got the chance to matter. I meant it. But I won't pretend that means there's no cost to it. Veyloth will use whatever they can find. If they find you — if they understand what you might be to this bloodline, to this curse"

"You know what I am." It wasn't quite a question. Something in her voice had gone careful, testing.

I turned to look at her fully. "I know that the wolf in me has been quiet around you in a way it hasn't been quiet around anyone in ten years. I don't yet know why. I have theories I haven't let myself finish thinking." I stepped closer, close enough that the wind carried the woodsmoke-and-frost scent of her over the salt air, close enough that the space between us had become the only distance in the world that mattered to me just then. "What I know for certain is that I would rather face down every soldier Veyloth has ever trained than go back to pretending the last seven days didn't happen. Draven's right that it isn't only mine to risk. So I'm asking you, plainly, instead of deciding it for you the way I've decided everything else in this castle for ten years, do you want this risk, Elara? Whatever it costs either of us?"

The moon caught her face fully then, and I watched her make the decision before she ever said the word watched it settle into her jaw, her eyes, the same steady certainty I'd first seen at the bottom of my chamber stairs a week ago, a girl who'd already chosen once at a village gate and wasn't in the habit of unmaking her own choices out of fear.

"Yes," she said. "I want this risk."

Somewhere below us the sea kept throwing itself against the cliffs the way it had for two hundred years of Ashgrave kings, indifferent to curses and wars and the particular reckless hope cracking open in my chest for the first time in a decade, and I reached for her hand in the dark, and she let me take it, and for one suspended moment neither of us said anything at all, because nothing needed saying that our hands hadn't already said first.